‘The Art of the Steal’ – Kamala Harris accused of plagiarism

Kurt Mahlburg

October 15, 2024 6 Reactions

Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer was a short hardcover volume Ms Harris released at the dawn of her political career as she began campaigning for the role of California’s attorney general. With her face and name featuring prominently on the cover, Rufo posits that this book “helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues”.

According to Rufo, Ms Harris and her co-author Joan O’C Hamilton:

• “lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report” in a discussion on high school graduation rates
• “without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release” and “passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim”
• “lifted promotional language from an Urban Institute report, and failed to cite [the] source” when “attempting to write a description of a nonprofit group”

The instance involving Wikipedia was especially grievous. Harris and her co-author contributed just 11 of their own words to an otherwise unedited 90-something word paragraph stolen from the famously unreliable crowdsourced site. Rufo explains:

To make matters worse, in duplicating Wikipedia’s language, Harris seems to have missed critical information and misstated a relevant detail. She claims, in prose identical to the online encyclopedia’s, that “illegal vending was down 24 percent” as a result of the court’s policies. Early in the paragraph, Harris cites the Bureau of Justice Assistance report to substantiate the figure. But she made a mistake: On Wikipedia, the “24 percent” figure was apparently tied to a different report, which found that “arrests for unlicensed vending,” rather than unlicensed vending as such,“fell by 24 percent” (emphasis mine). Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.

Stealing intellectual property for a book about crime? Quoting from Wikipedia for a publication whose title begins with the word “Smart”? That’s some brazen conduct — and some delicious irony to boot.

In Ms Harris’ defence, she is in good company. Between a 2016 piece by NPR titled “A Brief History Of Politicians Lifting Words From Other Sources”, and Politico’s more recent “5 times politicians were accused of plagiarizing,” almost a dozen other prominent figures are identified sullying their good name via linguistic bootlegging.

Mentioned in both reports was none other than Harris’ colleague-in-chief President Joe Biden, whose plagiarism in several 1987 speeches, and later revelations of similar conduct during his law school days, precipitated the end of Biden's campaign to become the 41st US president.

In a parallel universe (or a prior decade), it’s easy to imagine today’s revelation likewise ending Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

Alas, we live in this universe, and in this decade — in which the legacy media’s undisguised purpose is to run cover for its preferred (read “progressive”) candidate.

The New York Times has already published a hose-down pleasing to Kamala and her campaign staff that uses the predictable, yawn-inducing “Republicans pounce” framing.

“Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book,” the Pravda-esque headline hisses. The article’s lede pleads that “a plagiarism expert said the lapses were not serious”. What a convenient expert to have on hand.

As Rufo has already quipped in response, it’s not just the Times’ angle that’s amiss but also its key facts:

The Times claims that I only argued that Kamala Harris plagiarized “five sections” involving “about 500 words.” But this isn’t true. In my story, I wrote that Stefan Weber argued there are “more than a dozen” instances of “‘vicious plagiarism.’” This past Saturday, I provided the Times not only with my written analysis, which argues that there are “more than a dozen,” but with Weber’s full dossier, which included 18 allegations of varying severity. So, the Times deliberately withheld this crucial contextual information from its readers and from the supposed plagiarism expert, who, based on this limited information, called it “not serious.” They could have easily confirmed the “more than a dozen” point, but instead, lied by omission.

In his reply, Rufo exposed at least three other materially false claims made by the NYTabout the juicy story.

Will Harris get away with her misconduct, and escape the fate of her political predecessors who fell on their own swords?

Will the in-kind campaign contributions of the corporate press be enough to keep her in the race?

The answer is of course yes — but the media’s contortions will at least provide us with a few days’ comic relief. 

Is this just a distraction from the real issues of the campaign – or a key to Ms Harris’s character? 

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate architect, a primary school teacher, a missionary, and a young adult pastor.

Image credit: Vice President Harris on the campaign trail / www.whitehouse.gov